“Get Lit After Work”—Howard Axelrod Reads From Point of Vanishing

Boston Literary District hosts Howard Axelrod, author of the critically acclaimed, Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude.

On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy’s finger hooked behind Axelrod’s eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He needed to find, away from society’s pressures and rush, a sense of meaning that couldn’t be changed in an instant.

Howard Axelrod is the author of the memoir The Point of Vanishing. Axelrod currently teaches writing at GrubStreet in Boston and has previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Arizona, and Wentworth Institute of Technology.